Although dealing with the 15th century and the life of a great icon painter, Tarkovsky is really making a universal statement about the role of the artist in society, bringing hope to a Soviet cinema reduced to mediocrity by party-line censorship. His 1972 scifi epic, Solaris, compared favourably with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey both in conceptual originality and stylistic splendour.

81/2 (Federico Fellini): One of the great films about film-making, with Fellini regular Marcello Mastroianni as an alter ego struggling to deliver his next film under pressure from producers and his wife and mistress. The title refers to the number of films Fellini has directed, with collaborations counting as halves.

The Irish release was delayed three years by censorship.

Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev): A lifetime admirer of Shakespeare, whom he interpreted in contemporary terms, Kozintsev uses dramatic black-and-white Estonian locations to evoke a prison-like Denmark. Working from translations by Boris Pasternak, who rewrote the dialogue in everyday Russian rhythms, he gives Hamlet the aura of a 20thcentury outsider, a student prince alone in an alien world.

1967 Peter and Pavla (Milos Forman): Story about the fumbling frustrations of adolescent love in which the characters seem like real people, unaware that they are being observed by a candid camera. It marked the beginning of the socalled 'Prague Spring', brought to abrupt end by the return of communism's heavy fist. Happily, Forman escaped to the US, winning an Oscar with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

Marat Sade (Peter Brook): One of the great stage pieces of all time superbly realised in cinematic form. A provocative confrontation of two extreme viewpoints - represented by the supreme sensualist Sade and the supreme revolutionary Marat - takes place before an invited audience in a lunatic asylum.

Bonnie And Clyde (Arthur Penn): Few films in the 1960s equalled the power and lyrical sweep of Arthur Penn's mythologising of a couple of gun-happy Depression-era bank robbers on a rampage across the midwest. Using 'New Wave' techniques of slow motion and inter-cutting, with sex and violence as primary colours, Penn reinvented the gangster genre.

ہ Bout de Souffle/Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard): A pivotal film in French 'New Wave', it was delayed eight years by censorship but worth the wait. A young car thief kills a Paris cop and goes on the run with his American girlfriend. Stars JeanPaul Belmondo and Jean Seberg have since acquired iconic status.

The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini): Rooting the life of Christ in the physical reality of African landscapes, and using non-actors, as in a documentary, Pasolini reclaimed the gospel from pious propagandists and gave its humanist message a searing immediacy. An outsider because of his homosexuality and antipathy to consumerism ("the purely consumer way of life has no time for essential human values, " he told me), Pasolini was bludgeoned to death in Ostia in 1975.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy):

Inspired by his love of Hollywood musicals, Demy dreams up a love story in which all the dialogue is sung, while the Cherbourg locations are painted in an array of colours to match the costumes. Its prettified unreality has an infectious charm, a soufflé of sheer delight.

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick): Hypnotically poetic evocation of human evolution through time and space, from primitive ape to computercontrolled astronaut, Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's story made everything else in the genre seem redundant. Its sense of metaphysical mystery and awe, heightened by music, is unique in cinema.

The Graduate (Mike Nichols): With the Paul Simon theme song and Anne Bancroft as the predatory suburban housewife who seduces the son of her neighbour, The Graduate comically epitomised 1960s permissiveness with an accuracy that hasn't dated. For me, it was "the funniest and most serious movie of 1968".

Persona (Ingmar Bergman): A mental nurse identifies with her patient to the point where she shares her nervous breakdown, expressing a confusion of identity that is the film's challenging theme. The cinematic process itself becomes part of the undermining of reality to a point where the screen breaks up and the whirr of projector reminds us we are watching a film.

Point Blank (John Boorman): Doublecrossed and left to die, Lee Marvin hunts down his betrayers in a violent complex thriller that uses slow-motion flashbacks, fragmented narrative, freeze action and overlapping dialogue to heighten ambiguity.

Playtime (Jacques Tati): Jacques Tati lets his comic alter ego loose in Orly Airport, a modern hotel, a Paris street and the opening night of a plush restaurant, targeting the impersonal sameness and anonymity of gadget-obsessed modern life. The big 70mm screen allows him to have several gags going on at once, leaving it to the audience to spot the joke. It's visual humour at its most teasing.

Planet of the Apes (Franklin Schaffner):

Astronauts crashland on a planet where apes have taken over and humans are treated like animals, not realising they're in a time warp and that they're actually on postapocalyptic earth. Brilliant blend of popular entertainment and perceptive science fiction.

1969 Stolen Kisses (François Truffaut): The first part of a romantic trilogy - with Bed and Board and Love on the Run - through which Truffaut lived a sort of alternative life, with Jean-Pierre Leaud as his other self, courting and marrying and then divorcing a violin student played by Truffaut's real-life love Claude Jade. A film of beautifully observed moments, catching the fragility and fleeting joy of love .

Charlie Bubbles (Albert Finney):

Albert Finney directs himself as a celebrity novelist, emotionally anaesthetised by success and his own flaw, trying and failing to reconnect with his divorced wife Billie Whitelaw, his gauche secretary Liza Minnelli and his old drinking chum Colin Blakely.

If? (Lindsay Anderson): A flawed but fascinating analogy of Britain's class system set among a class of public schoolboys. Its appeal lies in the blurred distinction between thought and action and, perhaps, in the ambiguity of Anderson's attitude to what he is attacking.

Coogan's Bluff (Don Siegal): No one directed Clint Eastwood better than Don Siegal. Set amid Manhattan's skyscrapers, with Eastwood as an Arizona sheriff delivering an escaped killer to New York cops, it sardonically merges the conventions of western and crime thriller.